SCENARIO OF THE UNESCO GEOPARKS IN THE COVID 19 PANDEMIC

Abstract

The conception of a geopark comprises heritage conservation, sustainable economical growth and community engagement. The research of this article aims to identify how the situation of UNESCO geoparks in the COVID 19 pandemic is and how the confronting in these communities occurred. This is a bibliographic study through an integrative review. Bibliometrics for its composition was carried out in CAPES (Higher Education Personnel Improvement Coordination) databases: Web of Science, Scopus and Google Academics. The descriptors used to search the databases were: “geoparks”, “coronavirus”, “sustainable development”, “geodiversity” and “geotourism”. The English and Spanish translation terms and the booleans AND and OR were also used. Geoparks in many different countries had their activities negatively (most of them) or positively affected during the COVID 19 pandemic. Local communities, tourism, commerce, industry, transport, as well as the hospitality sector were affected by the health standards and restrictions imposed by the need for lockdown, social distancing and measures to prevent the COVID 19 pandemic.